The first episode of "Friends" was titled "The One Where it All Began." The last episode is titled "The Last One."
And the 233 episodes in between were all titled "The One With . . . " or "The One Without" or "The One At . . . " or The One Where . . . " or "The One In . . . " or "The One After . . . " or "The One On . . . " or "The One At . . . ." All of them.
What became sort of an inside joke began as a matter of expediency.
"First of all, no one sees the titles. Or very few people see the titles," said creator/executive producer David Crane. "And yet, we've been in writers' rooms where hours have been spent trying to come up with funny, word-play titles."
And Crane and fellow creator/executive producer Marta Kauffman didn't want to waste time trying to come up with a title that not much of anybody would see.
"We went, 'Oh my (gosh), let's just come up with titles that are exactly the way you talk about them the next day," Crane said.
You know, like people would say to their friends, "Did you see the one with the blackout?" — which was cleverly titled "The One With the Blackout."
And "The One With the Giant Poking Device" obviously refers to the time they thought Ugly Naked Guy in the building across the street was dead, so they fashioned a giant poking device out of chopsticks and tape to see if he really was. Dead, that is.
It didn't take long for them to start playing around with the naming convention a bit. "The One Where Underdog Gets Away" refers to a balloon that escaped from the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. And "The One With the Dirty Girl" was about a beautiful woman (Rebecca Romijn) Ross dated who turned out to be a slob.
"It was mostly expedient," Crane said. "And then it just became fun."
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com